Iran is capable of carrying out military strikes on U.S. interests all around the world if the Islamic Republic is attacked by the United States, Iran’s ambassador to Moscow said on Wednesday.

The United States has tried to force Tehran to scrap sensitive nuclear work by imposing sanctions targeting Iran’s central bank and giving U.S. banks new powers to freeze Iranian government assets. Iran’s ambassador to Moscow said that the United States would be making a serious mistake, akin to suicide, if it risked a military strike on OPEC’s No. 2 oil exporter. Washington has announced no such plans, but has said a military option is always on the table if Iran cannot be otherwise prevented from developing atomic weapons.

“The Americans know what kind of country Iran is. They are well aware of our people’s unity,” Iranian ambassador Seyed Mahmoud-Reza Sajjadi told a news conference in Moscow. And that’s why Iran is fully able to deliver retaliatory strikes on the United States anywhere in the world,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “Even if it attacks, we have a list of counter actions. (The United States) would be disappointed with their huge mistake.”

Iran has increasingly issued threatening statements against the West in recent weeks as tension has increased over its uranium enrichment program, which it moved last month to a mountain bunker better protected from possible air strikes.

Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful while Western powers fear Tehran is trying to build a nuclear bomb.

Iran will target any country used as a launchpad for attacks against its soil, the deputy Revolutionary Guards commander said, expanding Tehran’s range of threats in an increasingly volatile stand-off with world powers over its nuclear ambitions.

Although broadened and sharpened financial sanctions have begun to inflict serious economic pain in Iran, its oil minister asserted Saturday it would make no nuclear retreat even if its crude oil exports ground to a halt. Iran says its nuclear program is for civilian energy purposes. But its recent shift of uranium enrichment to a mountain bunker possibly impervious to conventional bombing, and refusal to negotiate peaceful guarantees for the program or open up to U.N. nuclear inspectors, have thickened an atmosphere of brewing confrontation, raising fears for Gulf oil supplies.

“Any spot used by the enemy for hostile operations against Iran will be subjected to retaliatory aggression by our armed forces,” Hossein Salami, deputy head of the elite Revolutionary Guards, told the semi-official Fars news agency Sunday.

The six, U.S.-allied Arab states in the Gulf Cooperation Council, situated on the other side of the vital oil exporting waterway from Iran, have said they would not allow their territories to be used for attacks on the Islamic Republic. But analysts say that if Iran retaliated for an attack launched from outside the region by targeting U.S. facilities in Gulf Arab states, Washington might pressure the host nations to permit those bases to hit back, arguing they should have the right to defend themselves.